Just a rainy-weekend anecdote, but I closed out the winter quarter at Cal State, San Bernardino, where I teach Introduction to World Theater. For the final, the students write a five-minute play, which their peers perform. One playwright, a returning student with a son in high school, wrote about tensions in her family, especially between herself and her son, which was bordering on estrangement. After the performance, she noted that the teenagers' dialogue had actually been written by her son, who told her that her own dialogue was pathetically "old school." Through that process, she said, he started to understand how she was thinking, and the complexities of how she perceived him and their situtation. It had a softening effect, she said. They're now much closer, and speaking to each other again, more like two adults than one adult and one child.

I'm often torn between the view that the theater opens windows of understanding versus windows of diversion. So there's some evidence for the former.